VMware Cloud Foundation coming to Amazon’s Sydney region

VMware will have VMware Cloud Foundation, the bundle of its three key software products for virtualisation — vSphere, vSAN and NSX — available in AWS’s Sydney region from Q3 of 2018.

VMware’s CTO of Cloud Platform, Kit Colbert, — who announced the move in a presentation at the AWS Summit in Sydney — told Computerworld: “We will be bringing this offering to the AWS Sydney region in Q3. We have it in two regions in the US and one in Europe and now we are expanding in APJ, starting with Australia.”

Colbert said demand for the offering had been high since its launch in the US and Europe in 2017. “We have surpassed our expectations and we are working as closely and as hard as we can with AWS to add more regions.”

He said that offering VMware Cloud Foundation on AWS was not simply a case of making software available under the normal AWS operating model.

“You could not run this on AWS previously, because it needs bare metal access which AWS did not offer. They had to do a bunch of work in their data centres to enable this bare metal use case.

“This is a first for them. They have never let anyone else run their software on bare metal in an AWS data centre. It was a big undertaking from an engineering perspective for both of us. Our engineering teams are working very closely together to facilitate this.”

Colbert said the service would be sold to customers by VMware, not AWS. “We handle the installation, the patching the monitoring. The experience is a VMware experience and the customer buys the service from VMware.”

He said benefits for customers would be greater simplicity, faster delivery of new features and reduced operating costs. “The customer does not need to think about how to architect this. They don’t need to do upgrades or know how to validate upgrades.

“And we can move a lot faster in this model. We release upgrades for our on premises software every 12 to 18 months. Now we are doing it much quicker, quarterly or faster. So customers are getting new features quicker.”

Colbert said the service would be offered at an hourly rate, billed monthly, covering software and hardware, or customers could commit to longer periods for significant discounts.

“We also have a hybrid loyalty program. If you have VMware cloud components on premises that you have paid for, each of those gives you a discount on the VMware Cloud pricing.”

He said the costs for the cloud offering were much lower than on-premises equivalents. “Customers tell us they are having to rethink their whole data centre strategy because this stuff is so cheap in the cloud compared to what they are doing on premises.”

Customers would also like to see service available on other major public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, Colbert said.

“There is certainly customer interest, and we have a huge customer base, but we have no concrete plans as yet. Our focus is to make customers on AWS successful. There is a ton of work to do there. We want to keep expanding around the world and to integrate it will all the great AWS technologies.”

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